Table of Contents:

Victor & Robert — The Creature — Romantic Science — The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley, first published in 1818, is a book that has been so tossed about by history that it’s sometimes difficult to go back and see it for what it actually is. Adapted to theatre and then to film, numerous modifications have been made to the original story, the most notable being the transference of Victor Frankenstein’s name to the creature he created, and the addition of certain striking visual elements to the monster, such as bolts emerging from his temple.

At its most basic, the popular cultural understanding of Frankenstein is that of a monster constructed out of dead body parts by a mad scientist, which then, unsurprisingly, causes all sorts of monstrous havoc. And this, to a certain extent, is also the plot of the original novel.

I’m going to ignore these myriad adaptations and return to the source. While doing so, I am going to attempt to place this story in its historical context, attempting to avoid the many anachronisms that are often thrown about when discussing works so keenly tied to the emergence of certain “genres.” The novel itself, like many classics, is idiosyncratic and not easily reducible. While the core premise is simple enough, the various bits and pieces reveal a complex story that does not fit into conventional lines. It is exactly this complexity and chaos that makes the original story so compelling.

It is well known that Mary Shelley began composing the novel while on a trip with her husband Percy and Lord Byron, both key figures in British Romanticism. Mary was only nineteen at the time, and this fact is actually quite important, as youth tends to go hand in hand with Romanticism, with its elevation of emotion above all else, its emphasis on freedom and liberty, and its attachment to nature. All of these themes are present in Frankenstein, and the severe anguish, shame, and dread that characterize both Victor Frankenstein and his Creature’s existence are also those that define the life of teenagers. I don’t say this to denigrate the novel at all: when I say that Frankenstein is an extremely emotional novel, I mean this in the best way possible. Its sentimentality is its greatest strength; it allows us to reckon with the philosophical questions of the novel on a more personal and direct level, to actually feel the consequences of the book’s events, rather than merely think about them intellectually.

All of the novel’s primary characters — Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the Creature — are allowed to narrate their experiences directly, encouraging a sympathetic understanding of their situation. We are allowed to understand why they do what they do, if not on a purely logical level, then at least on an emotional level. This emotional reasoning is far more important than any material circumstances; the novel skips over such prosaic concerns as how exactly Victor achieves his feat of creating life, or how the Creature manages to track him down recurrently throughout the novel. It is quite simple to find plot holes or unexplained coincidences in this novel. This is not a result of Shelley’s incompetence, but instead an indication that her focus was elsewhere. These “hows” are not vital to the story she wishes to tell.

Since it is this direct relationship we develop with the characters that makes the story work, it makes sense that we should start by understanding who they are.

VICTOR & ROBERT

The novel begins, somewhat ingeniously, not with our protagonist Victor Frankenstein himself but with a collection of letters from a man named Robert Walton, addressed to his sister, Margaret. The meaning of this frame story will become clear later, but at its most basic, it’s simply an engaging method of opening the story.

If we were to ignore these letters and begin instead with the book’s first “chapter,” we would be confronted with this paragraph:

I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation.

We would then learn about the life of Victor's parents, and how they came to adopt his “sister,” Elizabeth. Now, this is all pertinent information, and all of it will inform our understanding of the book’s plot. However, it doesn’t reveal to us much of what the book is actually about. It doesn’t tell us about Victor Frankenstein’s character, or foreshadow what he’s going to do in the rest of the book.

In contrast, when we look at Robert’s initial letter, the actual opening of the book, we read:

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

Now this is interesting. Immediately, we understand that Robert Walton is engaged in some sort of dangerous undertaking that lies outside the normal purview of human activity. He has grand ambitions, but he’s not so far gone as to forget the worries of his poor sister. We immediately understand at least one thing that this book is about: young men attempting to reconcile their individual ambition with their social existence.

Robert Walton wants to go to the North Pole. He wants to do this because no one else has ever done it. There is an ostensible scientific reason for his journey, but that’s not really the point. Robert mentions in his letters his Romantic nature: that he tried to be a poet and failed, and that this failure disappointed him immensely. This romanticism is vitally important, because we will find that Victor Frankenstein shares this inclination, and that this aspect of their nature is the reason they end up where they do. This similarity is, of course, why when the two of them meet, they immediately hit it off.

While travelling through the icy climes of the Arctic circle, further North than any reasonable sailor would attempt to journey, Robert espies what he perceives to be a gigantic person riding a dogsled across the snow. He quickly loses sight of this figure, but the next day comes across a second lonely traveler, this one stranded on a floating piece of ice with only one dog left to his pack. This is Victor Frankenstein, who reveals himself to be in pursuit of the gigantic man.

After a few days spent getting to know each other, Frankenstein decides to tell Robert his story. He introduces it as a cautionary tale: a life made up of a series of mistakes not to be replicated. In fact, the main pursuit of Victor’s life at this point is to undo everything he had ever done. Such shame and regret points to the idea that Victor has done something truly awful, but it’s hard to reconcile this with his demeanour. He doesn’t strike Robert as the type to have done something truly malicious, and this makes his case all the more curious.

All this leads us to anticipate Victor’s story with such relish that we don’t mind him beginning by telling us about his ancestors being distinguished councillors and syndics. In fact, it only whets our appetite the moreso. This is simply good storytelling. We must remember that most contemporary readers would not have gone into this novel already associating the name Frankenstein with the idea of making a horrible monster.

We find out that Victor grew up in a loving family, with his mother, his father, his adopted sister Elizabeth, and his younger brother, William. He has nothing but adoration for his family, and their loving care provides him with all he needs as a growing boy. At seventeen, his parents decide to send him off to college, in order to allow him to experience more of the world. As he is about to leave, however, Elizabeth catches scarlet fever, and while she eventually recovers, the disease passes on to Victor’s mother, killing her.

Adaptations such as Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film make a big deal of this death, turning it into the motivation behind Frankenstein’s experiments, but this is simply not the case in the book, as Victor overcomes his grief relatively quickly and reasonably. “My mother was dead,” he writes, “but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.”

More concerning to him is the grief of Elizabeth, who, despite being his adopted sister, is also the love of his life. This ends up complicating matters far less than one might think, as no one within the book finds this relationship strange in any way.

Eventually, Victor has to leave the comforts of home, and face the world of strangers. This is an important step in Frankenstein’s life, as we are to find that his happy domestic home was perhaps the only thing keeping his ambitions in check.

It doesn’t take very long for us to find out what Victor Frankenstein regrets so about his life. After studying natural science for a period of time, Victor comes upon what he calls “the cause of generation and life,” and realizes that he can now “bestow animation upon lifeless matter.” He does this by studying dead bodies, and contemplating the line that stands between life and death. This study is as philosophical as it is scientific, and feels more like some sort of esoteric religious or shamanistic knowledge than anything you’d expect a scientist to discover. But more on that later.

What’s important now is that Victor becomes obsessed with his new discovery. We already know from his devotedness to his studies that he has an obsessive nature, but this newfound knowledge escalates it to an even greater degree. He isolates himself from his family and friends, and in fact all of society, in order to further his work. In fact, the very nature of his work, dealing as it does with the dead and decomposing bodies of human beings, places him in opposition to normal human life.

People generally don’t like dead bodies, because dead bodies look like people, but they aren’t people. Our ideas of death generally don’t deal with actual death at all, but with memory. We honour people’s lives, the way they were before they died, and we lament that they are no longer present in our world. If we believe in an afterlife, it is just that: another life, where the people we knew exist as they did before, albeit in another form or another realm. The dead bodies they leave behind are equivalent to tombstones, mere relics denoting that someone once lived. Desecrating a body isn’t sacrilegious because of the attributes of the body itself, which the soul has departed from, but instead disrespectful to the memory of the person who once lived within it.

What Victor is attempting to do, in revivifying an amalgam of human corpses, has to be done in isolation, because it goes against our very perception of life and death. He abandons his loving family for the sake of his ambition, and so crazed is he about his new power that he doesn’t even realize its grotesqueness until it’s too late.

When Frankenstein finally succeeds in restoring life to a patched-up human body, when he sees the life-like movement of its lifeless and decaying face, he recoils with horror. If we truly attempt to imagine what this creation would have looked like, it is easy to sympathize with his reaction, even if it turns out to be the only aspect of Frankenstein’s later actions that you sympathize with. We read:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

The monstrosity of the creature, easy to ignore while simply a lifeless specimen on a table, becomes all too real once it becomes animate. It is intolerable because of its paradoxical nature; the Creature straddles the line between life and death. He is clearly alive, but he’s not an alive person — at least not initially — but merely an alive body.

Victor, horrified by this aberration, the product of his lonely project, realizes only now that he’s done something truly awful. Despite occasionally espousing altruistic notions of furthering scientific knowledge, what truly propels Victor is his egoistic pursuit of individual achievement. But what he’s achieved is the fashioning of a monster.

Thus begins Frankenstein’s nightmare. And ‘nightmare’ is the only truly appropriate word for his experience, because it often defies any sense of reality, with the world itself seeming to bend to the whims of Victor’s emotions. When he comes across his creature, it is often during extreme weather: in the midst of a storming forest, atop a snowy Alp, or on the freezing tides of the Arctic Ocean. The world rains and pours on his misery, desolation, and grief. (It is no surprise that his nightmare begins on a “dreary night of November.”) The contrivances by which he and the Creature find each other again and again, the mysteriousness of the entire process that belies its creation, all point to an intention to tell a story that takes place in an emotional, and not a physical, reality.

Victor Frankenstein lives in a world of his own horror and shame. It is a world he created by isolating himself, and after a certain point, the process begins to self-perpetuate, pushing him further and further from humanity. He begins his work in Ingolstadt, a small city in Bavaria, but when tasked with preparing a second creature, he retreats to the wilds of Scotland, and by the end of the novel has journeyed to the furthest reaches of the known world.

All the while, Victor is still loved by his father, by his friend Clerval, and by Elizabeth. Elizabeth at this point plays two roles: firstly, as a sister-figure, she represents Victor’s childhood and upbringing, surrounded by love and support. Secondly, as a romantic interest, she represents a settled married life, an ideal which quickly becomes impossible. Thus, Elizabeth is both Victor’s past and his future.

Victor can not accept any of this love that is offered him. The guilt of his failure is embodied in the Creature and its murderous disposition. If he tries to live with his loved ones, they will be killed. Of course, he can’t tell anyone this, and so in their eyes he is being needlessly cruel in his isolation. Thus, he is trapped.

Victor Frankenstein is a man who chooses to be alone; one who deliberately, although unwittingly, sets himself on the path toward losing his humanity. His Creature, on the other hand, has no such choice.

THE CREATURE

Frankenstein’s Creature is an ugly and wretched individual, his ugliness the result of his unnatural birth. While he has all the emotions and desires of a human, he is fundamentally inhuman, because unlike every other human ever to exist, Frankenstein has no parents. More than that, he has no community. He is cast into the world utterly alone, with no genealogy or support structure. There is not a single person in the world who loves him for who he is; in fact, the only person who knows about him despises him. This is a degree of loneliness that is almost unimaginable.

Thrust into this world with no upbringing, the Creature has no access to the sort of social knowledge that we develop as children by watching and interacting with other people. He is a blank slate, and has to learn everything by himself. His first experience in life is witnessing Victor’s utter disgust at his appearance, his first taste of knowledge that of his own ugliness and unlovability. While he isn’t able to conceptualize this at first, the foundation of the Creature’s knowledge is cruelty. No matter where he goes, he suffers unfair treatment through no fault of his own, and no matter how much good he attempts to do, it is always repaid with cruelty. Thus, it only makes sense that cruelty becomes his very language, his only means of communicating with other people.

The first time we are presented the Creature’s side of the story is when he confronts Victor in the mountains. Up to this point, the Creature is simply Victor’s nightmare, a manifestation of his estrangement from society. It never even occurs to either Victor or us as the reader that this Creature would have any internality to speak of. As way of greeting, Victor exclaims to the Creature, “Devil! Do you dare approach me?”

The Creature immediately shows himself the more collected of the two, responding in a more sophisticated manner than one may expect from a man in his position. He entreats Victor to hear his side of the story, which Victor initially rejects, quite reasonably angry at the Creature for the murder of his brother.

Eventually, however, we get to hear the Creature’s story, which is as follows:

After escaping from Frankenstein’s laboratory, the Creature flees to the nearby woods. At first, he is unable to separate the various objects that make up the world around him, experiencing all his sensations as a sort of overwhelming blur. Through experience, he begins to discover certain facts, such as the existence of the moon; the hunger and thirst he feels, and how to alleviate them; and the warmth that emanates from fire.

After a few lonely days and nights in the woods, he comes across a hut, where he finds a shepherd, who runs from him in fear. He sleeps in this hut, and when he awakes, explores the nearby village, where he is attacked by the villagers and once again has to flee. He makes his new home in a hovel near a farmhouse, and this is where he encounters the De Lacey family.

From his little hovel, the Creature is able to observe the daily lives of these people without being seen himself, and thus begins to learn about the daily lives of humans. This is his first real social encounter, and the beginning of his cultural education. Up to now, he has operated on instinct and the logic of beasts, his only concerns being food, safety, and shelter. Through watching the De Laceys, he learns language, both verbal and written, as well as the ways in which humans are meant to treat each other, which goes against all of his experiences with them thus far.

We spend some time learning the story of his new friends. The main narrative is of the brother Felix, who has fallen in love with a woman named Safie. Safie’s mother is a Christian Arab who had been captured as a slave by the Ottomans before, in turn, capturing the heart of a Muslim Turkish merchant who then married her.

This whole narrative is almost interesting in its superfluousness, as it doesn’t have any of the direct emotional quality of the rest of the book. It’s just a series of tropes common to popular romances of the time, particularly the aspects relating to the opposition between the Muslim Ottomans and the Christian Europeans, so obvious as to be almost pandering. The Creature, however, who doesn’t know any other sort of story, is impressed, and learns through this tale “to admire the virtues and deprecate the vices of mankind.”

When placed next to the following chapter, in which the Creature, who just barely knows how to read, enjoys Plutarch, Milton, and Goethe, we start to understand a bit more what’s going on here.

The Creature is born a helpless baby, who knows nothing of the world beyond what is directly before him. He is living on instinct, learning only through trial and error. He is the typical Primordial Man, the Brute, a creature without civilization. When you merely create a man and place him into the world, this is what he will look like.

Through the story of Felix and Safie, the Creature gets his first taste of other people having emotions. This is the most basic building block of social education. By being introduced to a story of sadness and loneliness, the Creature finally understands that he is a person, and that the emotions that he feels are the same as those other people feel. This is a good start, but it’s not quite civilization. For that, the Creature needs imagination.

This is where his Classical education comes in, in the form of the three books that the Creature acquires. Plutarch’s Lives contains a collection of biographies of important Greek and Roman figures. This serves as the Creature’s history class. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a theological epic, providing the Creature with an introduction to Christianity, as well as poetry.

After reading Paradise Lost, the Creature compares himself directly to Adam, saying,

He [Adam] had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.

Adam is born out of God’s love, and he is provided by God with a safe haven where he can learn and develop. This is analogous to the way in which most of us are born, into a world where people exist who are willing to take care of us, whether that be our biological family, or some sort of adoptive family. This is what allows us to grow from a weird-looking baby into a human being capable of participating in human communities. The Creature’s story is that of someone without that initial love, that initial place where they belong. He has been cast from the Garden, cursed and left to fend for himself, without the love of his Father and Creator.

Thus it’s no surprise that he finds the apotheosis of his emotions in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. This is a more contemporary novel, published less than fifty years prior to Frankenstein, and tells the story of an incredibly emotional and lonely young man, full of unrequited love. It is quite hilariously on the nose that this is the Creature’s introduction to literature, because if there is any literary character that he is going to relate to, it’s Werther, who he even calls a “divine being.”

Through this education, the Creature is able to come to an understanding of who he is, and what he is lacking. He tries to talk to his new friends, starting with their blind father who he hopes won’t experience the same prejudice when confronted with the Creature’s physical deformity, but this episode ends in tragedy when the others come home and the Creature panics.

His new friends, so horrified by his appearance in their home, move away, and in a fit of rage, the Creature burns down their house, and resolves to return to where he was created and confront Victor. At his deepest nadir, he comes across Victor’s younger brother, William. In his last final effort at human connection, the Creature reaches out to the boy, hoping that due to his youth, he won’t yet have learned to fear him. This hope is misplaced, and when the boy reveals himself to be none other than a relation of Victor, the Creature murders him.

The Creature narrates: “My heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph; clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I too can create desolation!’” This is the Creature’s final lesson: at this point, he learns that violence and the imposition of suffering are his only forms of agency, and it is only by these means that he can engage with humanity on his own terms.

Rejected by humanity at every turn, the Creature realizes that, although he is human in all the ways that ought to truly count, he will always be different and apart. But he can’t remain alone — it is simply too intolerable — and thus he commands Frankenstein to make him a companion.

In this sense, what he desires is actually similar to Victor at the end of the novel, who near the end of his life, says to Robert:

I have longed for a friend; I have sought one who would sympathize with and love me. Behold, on these desert seas I have found such a one, but I fear I have gained him only to know his value and lose him.

Victor and the Creature are not so dissimilar, in the end. They both suffer the same fate: they must banish themselves to the furthest reaches in order to avoid tainting the human world with their presence. Victor, because he can not reciprocate anyone’s love without the Creature — the product of his guilt and his shame — killing them, and the Creature, because he can not be loved, for his birth has made him too horrid to look upon. What they both want is a companion: the comfort that comes with being around people who recognize you as a fellow human being.

However, in spite of this sympathy, the two are locked in an eternally antagonistic relationship. They are each responsible for each other’s suffering; in this way, they are each entirely justified in blaming the other for their problems. However, it becomes a sort of recursive loop; although Victor obviously started the whole thing, at a certain point they are each perpetuating the struggle, escalating it further and further.

We can blame Victor for starting the whole thing, of course, but I don’t know if we can blame him for the horror he experiences at the Creature’s birth, or his grief for the loss of his family. It is easy to say that Victor should have done right by the Creature, but this is only possible from a detached perspective; when viewed through the lens of Victor’s emotional experience, his actions make perfect sense.

In the same way, we can sympathize with the Creature, with his unnatural birth and rejection from humanity, while at the same time recognizing that a being whose entire existence becomes predicated on the inflicting of violence and suffering is not perhaps a good sort of being to have around, and given the choice, we might not want to create more of them.

There is no easy answer here; there is no good side or bad side. The conflict is messy and ambiguous, making a satisfying resolution almost impossible.

This is where the true genius of the frame story comes in, as the third-party viewpoint of Robert Walton allows us to synthesize these two stories into a cohesive whole, and from that whole conceptualize our final reading of the novel. But before we reach that resolution, I would like to touch on the book’s relation to science, and from there, mythology.

ROMANTIC SCIENCE

When anachronistically wielding the blunt, heavy object that is the label “Science fiction,” it is important to understand the specific relationship between the two words that make up the term. This relationship will differ from novelist to novelist, and even from novel to novel, depending on the personal temperament of the author, and the historical moment in which they are writing.

Mary Shelley didn’t intend to write a work of science fiction, most obviously because science fiction as a term didn’t exist. In present usage, science fiction for the most part describes a specific form of literature: mid 20th-century short stories and paperbacks that primarily attempt to reckon with the new technologies of the times changing our relationship to outer space, and the repercussions of what we may find out there; as well as robotics, and how these new machines will change our reality and our conceptions of ourselves.

What makes science fiction interesting is the ambivalence toward science and technology. In a book like 2001: A Space Odyssey, technological development is equated to our growth as a species; as we are able to explore further and further, we come to understand what we are, and our place in the universe. On the other hand, we have dystopian novels such as Brave New World, which show the ways in which technology can be used to oppress humanity and limit its potential.

When dealing with the antecedents of this modern form of science fiction, there are myriad choices of where to look. Frankenstein is often positioned here, but we have to remember that Shelley did not intend this; she was just writing interesting books, combining the style of her time with the immensity of her imagination.

Perhaps an interesting book to bring up here is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which combines the then-modern technology of the scientific method with the then-modern philosophy of the self-sufficient individual. Everything that Robinson Crusoe creates and does on the island is possible, or at least is made to seem possible. He gets plenty of help from the tools of European civilization, which wash ashore with him from his boat. This access to European science is exactly what allows him to outperform the so-called “savages” who inhabit the nearby area. Robinson Crusoe is an unambiguous celebration of instrumental science. Frankenstein, on the opposite hand, displays an obvious mistrust of such scientific pursuits.

It’s important to note, especially when looking at older works, exactly what fell under the purview of science at the time of writing. Nowadays, a story about travelling to the moon, for example, is a story of engineering and technology; however, in the past, the moon was the realm of fantasy. This is why the claim that the Japanese folk legend Princess Kaguya is the first work of science-fiction, which is a claim I’ve actually heard people make, is patently absurd; the moon in that story is simply a blank setting for capricious invention. It is a far-away place for things to be or to come from, well beyond the realm of any empirical claim. One simply could not have knowledge of the moon as a place, only as a moving object in the night sky.

In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, the moon represents an interesting duality. The moon is not a place, but a moving target at which to fire a cannon, and the primary plot of the novel is concerned with the logistical and engineering hurdles one must overcome in order to construct and aim such a cannon. Here we see the old way of viewing the moon, combined with the new: the moon as a distant and unknowable world, and as a place accessible via technology.

Frankenstein occupies a similar place between science and fantasy. The main character, Victor Frankenstein, is caught between two distinct types of science. The first is that with which he becomes enraptured in his youth: the “natural philosophy” of Renaissance thinkers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. To these writers, natural philosophy, or natural science, was fundamentally linked to theology. Their cosmologies included not only the Earth, but the Heavens as well, and were based on an intuitive understanding that came from constructing arguments via hypothetical principles. Observation and experimentation, while not absent, were not at the centre of such a system.

However, as Victor Frankenstein grows up, he finds that all this knowledge he had attained is outdated. The new empirical science, based on the scientific method of Francis Bacon, has little need for any of these cosmological systems. Instead, knowledge is attained by regularly observing physical phenomena, and then arranging this data in order to extrapolate principles.

What Victor ends up with is a strange mix of the old and the new. While he studies the more subdued and humble science of his day, there still exists within him that humanistic ideal, that ambition to know and understand everything, which characterized Renaissance science. At this time, the idea of creating or modifying a living being has much more in common with sorcery or witchcraft than science.

In fact, the actual method that Victor employs is left entirely unexplained. Such details, which make up the foundation of modern science, are unimportant, because Victor is not a modern scientist. He is a Romantic scientist, a magical scientist — he’s a sorceror, essentially. His goal is not the slow and steady accumulation of information, but the bombastic and explosive results promised by alchemy. He is young, and he wants everything to happen now.

In Victor, we see the transformation of the hermit archetype, from the wizard hiding away in his tower or cave, performing spells and concocting potions; to the mad scientist hiding away in his laboratory, engaged in cutting-edge experiments. Magic and technology both transcend nature; what we often dislike about them is that they throw what we consider a natural order into disarray, by allowing for transformations that were previously impossible. Magic can turn a human into a newt; technology can turn a human into a cybernetically enhanced being, capable of inhuman feats. This disruption is not only unnatural, but unethical, either because it goes against God’s perfect system, or because it goes against our perfect system.

Observing nature is all well and good; it is a way of praising God by elucidating the perfection of his system. In modern secular terms, it is a way of glorifying nature, which is often confused with science itself — see online science videos that say, “Science is so cool,” when what they really mean to say is that natural phenomena caught on film are cool.

Victor Frankenstein often makes the claim that his work is part of an attempt to expand humanity’s knowledge. This is what Mr. Krempe, the teacher of natural philosophy at his school, considers the ideal of science. However, VIctor does not stop at knowledge; instead, he instrumentalizes his new understanding, using the principles to create. This is technology: using science as a tool.

When people rail against science, what they are often really talking about is technology, specifically the hubris involved in attempting to use our fallible scientific understanding to modify or improve the works of nature. Theologically, this is an affront to God. It is, on top of that, extremely dangerous, as such modifications can easily disrupt the conditions that make our current life possible. We see this with climate change, where our misuse of naturally occurring resources has had disastrous effects on the environment, thus endangering the ecosystems that sustain our existence.

These fears are not misplaced, and they are also not new. Technology has always been frightening, because it always brings about new ways of living, and there’s no way to know that these new ways won’t be significantly worse than what came before.

And this brings us, quite naturally, to the myth of Prometheus. Why does this novel carry the subtitle, The Modern Prometheus?

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

Prometheus was quite a popular image in British Romanticism. Of the two poets who accompanied Mary Shelley during the trip on which she wrote Frankenstein, both ended up composing works about this myth.

The basic story of Prometheus is that he provided humanity with technology and knowledge, usually symbolized by the ability to produce fire. For this, he is punished by Zeus, the foremost of the Olympian Gods, by being chained to a rock and forced to have his liver daily eaten by an eagle, whereupon it immediately grows back for the eagle’s next meal.

One interesting aspect of the myth stems from the question of whether Prometheus’ gift to humanity was not also a curse, as humanity would go on to use these newfound abilities to cause themselves all sorts of misfortune. He is also, at times, credited with creating humanity itself, providing the first obvious parallel to Frankenstein.

Another aspect of Prometheus, emphasized in the Romantic tradition, is his heroism. This heroism comes from his position as a champion of humanity in the face of the Gods, as well as his resilience in the face of eternal torture. One is reminded in this second case of the position that Sisyphus occupies in Camus’ 20th century absurdism.

(Now, as a side note, it may initially seem strange that a figure so closely associated with technology would be celebrated by the Romantics, who so clearly place the works of nature above the works of industry. However, we must remember that at the origin of technology lies human imagination and creativity. Technology is about tools, but imagination is about Ideas, and there’s nothing more humanistic than celebrating man’s Ideas.)

In both Byron’s poem, "Prometheus", and Percy Shelley’s lyrical drama, "Prometheus Unbound", the Titan is seen as a resilient but tragic hero, which is in line with Aeschylus’ 5th century BC tragedy, "Prometheus Bound".

In "Prometheus Unbound", Prometheus is a Christ-like figure, opposing the Earthly tyranny of Zeus much like how Jesus opposed the earthly dominion of the Roman Empire. Shelley’s Prometheus endures his torture through his belief in the impending downfall of Zeus’ dominion, which will bring about a new world of peace and harmony.

On the other side of the coin, in Milton’s Paradise Lost — which the Creature reads as part of his education — Satan, by convincing Eve to eat from the forbidden tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, plays a Promethean role, liberating humanity from the yoke of incomplete knowledge, and allowing them to aim at Godhood. This is, in fact, a bad thing, because by doing so, he is leading them toward a repeat of his own downfall. What Satan brings to the Garden is pride, and a result of this pride is a distrust of God and his works.

We can see by these examples that this symbol is malleable, being used for entirely different purposes depending on the work. You can’t get much more opposite than Christ and Satan. We can sort of see, then, why this image or this type is so alluring to poets. There’s so much potential for interpretation and making connections, and this ambiguity is what gives the works their charm.

In Mary Shelley’s novel, the Modern Prometheus is quite clearly Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s Prometheus, like Milton’s Satan, is not rebelling against Zeus. He is not rebelling against worldly power. He is instead rebelling against God, and against Nature. Whereas the torture of Prometheus in Aeschylus’ "Prometheus Bound" and Percy Shelley’s "Prometheus Unbound" is an injustice, in Frankenstein, this torture is, in fact, justice. Victor Frankenstein has gone too far, and his Creature is his punishment. The additional layer that makes this story extra compelling, is that the Creature itself is also punished, but this time, for no reason at all.

What exactly is Victor Frankenstein being punished for? The most obvious answer is his overstepping the bounds of human knowledge and technology, but I think there’s more to it than that. If we think about it, all he has done on this front is study the physical composition of the human body, and use its own properties to resuscitate it. It’s not like he summons a demon or uses black magic.

However, what Victor does is abandon his family, abandon society, and isolate himself in order to accomplish his goal. We see that his Creature, prior to his social education at the farm of the De Lacey’s, is not really human; he’s a beast, living purely on instinct. In a similar vein, when Victor stops participating in the social world for the sake of his experiments, and furthermore, surrounds himself by human corpses — which we generally keep far away from where we live, going so far as to bury them underground — he himself becomes inhuman. It is his descent into inhumanity that allows him to create the inhuman being that is the Creature.

Where Victor Frankenstein goes too far is not when the Creature comes alive, but long before that. It is when he stops writing letters to his father and to Elizabeth. It is when he allows his scientific pursuits to take precedence over his family. This is when Victor becomes an unbalanced individual, someone who puts his own passion before his ties to the social world and his loved ones, and thereby loses them all.

Robert’s final decision makes clear whether Victor is, in any way, heroic. As the ship carries on further toward the vicinity of the North Pole, the journey becomes more treacherous. Eventually the ship is fully surrounded by ice, and the crew is being decimated by the conditions. Robert Walton is facing mutiny, and has to decide whether to persevere or return home.

At the first hint of the possibility of giving up, Victor jumps to life: he delivers a hearty and, as Robert calls it, “heroic” speech, in which he rouses the crew to action and convinces them to carry on. This speech invites a comparison to Captain Ahab, who is similarly inspired by Milton’s Satan, with the same arrogance toward God and the same charismatic force.

But Frankenstein’s words are less convincing than his actions. Almost immediately after this speech, Robert acquiesces to the crew’s wishes and consents to return home. This happens incredibly suddenly — literally in the following paragraph — which reveals just how fleeting this heroic feeling is, in the face of the hard evidence that is Frankenstein’s regrettable existence. Knowing what he does about where Frankenstein’s single-minded ambition took him, why would Robert wish to follow? He is not yet too far gone — this whole time, he has been writing to his sister at home, maintaining that connection to the world. His monster has yet to be created, and he has been given the opportunity to avoid this fate.

This is the final word of the novel: what we are to gleam from the fate of our Modern Prometheus. Man was not meant to be alone: a man alone is no man at all. It is no use acquiring absolute knowledge of the physical world — whether that be the knowledge of when life turns to death, or the knowledge of what’s at the North Pole — if it means condemning oneself to a lonesome existence.

I think the fact of Robert Walton being a former poet is important here. Mary Shelley is familiar with the type of personality that comes with a passion for Romantic poetry; after all, many of her friends, including her husband, were Romantic poets. They rebel against society, refusing to follow the paths laid out for them. They bury themselves in their works, constructing whole worlds in which they live, alone. The work is the important thing; all else is secondary.

But all this work is for naught if you cease to be human. Being a Romantic poet requires this devotion, this individual spirit, this connection to a natural world that supersedes the arbitrariness of society; but all this must be balanced with humanity, and therefore, love. You can’t write a great work of literature without love in your heart, because you can’t truly reach people unless you have that desire to connect to them. Love is what makes us human: not being loved, and not loving, but both.

This is what’s missing from our Prometheuses. Prometheus doesn’t help people out because he’s nice and he likes them, but out of anger. He helps people because he’s pissed off at Zeus, or at God, and wants to show what he can do. He’s an anti-hero, because his whole existence is antagonistic. He is heroic in his resilience, in his rebellion, but to what end?

What Shelley does in this novel is offer her Prometheus another choice. She gives him a family, a wife, a friend. And when he rejects all of these, it shows just how little of a hero he really is. When we get to Percy Shelley’s adaptation several years later, suddenly the image of Prometheus has changed; he is no longer defined by anger but by a universal Love. He has turned from Satan to Christ.

In my eyes, this proves the power of Mary Shelley’s work. She has recognized a type of person — a type of young man, specifically — who sets themselves on a course of self-destruction and misery, and she has written a story that represents this plight not literally, but emotionally. The novel is fantastical, but the emotions are real; they are immediately recognizable even in their extreme intensity, and it is in fact this intensity that makes them so resonant.

Frankenstein is not a story about a man who creates a monster. It is the story of a man who is a monster — a man who turns himself into a monster. It is not about creating a person, but about what happens to a person after they are created, and what they need — love — and what happens to them when they don’t get it. It is a tragedy not because bad things happen but because they so very easily could have not happened; it was all willed into existence by a man who failed to recognize what it means to be a human being.