Title An excerpt from a study of Frankenstein or, The New Prometheus

Title: An excerpt from a study of Frankenstein: or, The New Prometheus Author(s): Harold Bloom Publication Details: Partisan Review 32.4 (Fall 1965): p611-618. Source: Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, p611-618. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning In his influential study of Frankenstein, excerpted below, respected American educator and critic Bloom focuses on solipsism and Prometheanism in the work, which he regards as an extreme example of “the Romantic mythology of the self.”The motion picture viewer who carries his obscure but still authentic taste for the sublime to the neighborhood theater, there to see the latest in an unending series of Frankenstein, participates in a Romantic terror now nearly one hundred and fifty years old. The terror is a familiar and a pleasing one, and few figures in contemporary mythology are as universally loved as Frankensteins once pathetic monster, now a star beaconing from the abode of television, comic strips and the sweatshirts of the young.“Frankenstein,” to most of us, is the name of a monster rather than of a monsters creator, for the common reader and the common viewer have worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly based on a central duality in Mary Shelleys novel. As Richard Church and Muriel Spark were the first to record, the monster and his creator are the antithetical halves of a single being. Miss Spark states the antithesis too cleanly; for her, Victor Frankenstein represents the feelings, and his nameless creature the intellect. In her view, the monster has no emotion, and “what passes for emotion . are really intellectual passions arrived at through rational channels.” Miss Spark carries this argument far enough to insist that the monster is asexual, and that he demands a bride from Frankenstein only for companionship, a conclusion evidently at variance with the novels text.The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein is a very complex one, and to be described more fully it must be placed in the larger context of Romantic literature and its characteristic mythology. The shadow or double of the self is a constant conceptual image in Blake and Shelley, and a frequent image, more random and descriptive, in the other major Romantics, especially in Byron. In Frankenstein, it is the dominant and recurrent image, and accounts for much of the latent power the novel possesses.No Romantic writer employed the Prometheus archetype without a full awareness of its equivocal potentialities. The Prometheus of the ancients had been for the most part a spiritually reprehensible figure, though frequently a sympathetic one, both in terms of his dramatic situation and in his close alliance with mankind against the gods. But this alliance had been ruinous for man, in most versions of the myth, and the Titans benevolence toward humanity was hardly sufficient recompense for the alienation of man from heaven that he had brought about. Both sides of Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story. The same Prometheus who is taken as an analogue of the crucified Christ is regarded also as a type of Lucifer, a son of light justly cast out by an offended heaven.In the Romantic readings of Miltons Paradise Lost (and Frankenstein is implicitly one such reading), this double identity of Prometheus is a vital element. Blake, whose mythic revolutionary named Orc is another version of Prometheus, saw Miltons Satan as a Prometheus gone wrong, as desire restrained until it became only the shadow of desire, a diminished double of creative energy. Shelley went further in judging Miltons Satan as an imperfect Prometheus, inadequate because his mixture of heroic and base qualities engendered in the readers mind a “pernicious casuistry” inimical to the spirit of art.Blake, more systematic a poet than Shelley, worked out an antithesis between symbolic figures he named Spectre and Emanation, the shadow of desire and the total form of desire, respectively. A reader of Frankenstein, recalling the novels extraordinary conclusion with its scenes of obsessional pursuit through the Arctic wastes, can recognize the same imagery applied to a similar symbolic situation in Blakes lyric on the strife of Spectre and Emanation:My Spectre around me night and dayLike a Wild beast guards my way.My Emanation far withinWeeps incessantly for my Sin.A Fathomless and boundless deep,There we wander, there we weep;On the hungry craving windMy Spectre follows thee behind.He scents thy footsteps in the snow,Wheresoever thou dost goThro the wintry hail and rain .Frankensteins monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the enormous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of actuality, rather than a dream of desire.Though abhorred rather than loved, the monster is the total form of Frankensteins creative power, and is more imaginative than his creator. The monster is at once more intellectual and more emotional than his maker, indeed he excels Frankenstein as much (and in the same ways) as Miltons Adam excels Miltons God in Paradise Lost. The greatest paradox, and most astonishing achievement, of Mary Shelleys novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a Modern Adam as his creator is a Modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all more able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness which compels a heightened realization of the self. For, like Blakes Spectre and Emanation, or Shelleys Alastor and Epipsyche, Frankenstein and his monster are the solipsistic and generous halves of the one self. Frankenstein is the mind and emotions turned in upon themselves, and his creature is the mind and emotions turned imaginatively outward, seeking a greater humanization through a confrontation of other selves.I am suggesting that what makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed, frequently clumsy novel is that it vividly projects a version of the Romantic mythology of the self, found, among other places, in Blakes Book of Urizen, Shelleys Prometheus Unbound and Byrons Manfred. It lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works but precisely because of that Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics.There are two paradoxes at the center of Mrs. Shelleys novel, and each illuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first is that Frankenstein was successful: he did create Natural Man, not as he was, but as the meliorists saw him. Indeed, Frankenstein did better than this, since his creature was more imaginative even than himself. Frankensteins tragedy stems, not from his Promethean excess, but from his own moral error, his failure to love. He abhorred his creature, became terrified of it, and fled his responsibilities.The second paradox is the more ironic. This disaster either would not have happened, or would not have mattered anyway, if Frankenstein had been an esthetically successful maker; a beautiful “monster,” or even a passable one, would not have been a monster. The creature himself bitterly observes:Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.As the sensuous horror of his creature was no part of Victor Frankensteins intention, it is worth noticing how this came about. It would not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of creation, as being momentarily a moral idiot. There is an indeliberate humor, to which readers since 1945 are doubtless more sensitive than earlier ones, in the contrast between the enormity of the scientists discovery, and the mundane emotions of the discoverer. Finding that “the minuteness of the parts” slows him down, he resolves to make his creature “about eight feet in height, and proportionably large.” As he works on, he allows himself to dream that “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” Yet he knows his is a “workshop of filthy creation,” and he fails the fundamental test of his own creativity. When the “dull yellow eye” of his creature opens, this creator falls from the autonomy of a supreme artificer to the terror of a child of earth: “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” He flees his responsibility, and sets in motion the events that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for a being (rather like Lawrences Gerald in Women in Love) who has never achieved a full sense of anothers existence.It is part of Mary Shelleys insight into her mythological theme that all the monsters victims are innocents. The monster not only refuses actively to slay his guilty creator; he mourns for him, though with the equivocal tribute of terming the scientist a “generous and self-devoted being.” Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus who has violated nature, receives his epitaph from the ruined second nature he has made, the God-abandoned, who consciously echoes the ruined Satan of Paradise Lost, and proclaims “Evil thenceforth became my good.” It is imaginatively fitting that the greater and more interesting consciousness of the creature should survive his creator, for he alone in Mrs. Shelleys novel possesses character. Frankenstein, like Coleridges Ancient Mariner, has no character in his own right; both figures win a claim to our attention only by their primordial crimes against original nature.The monster is of course Mary Shelleys finest invention, and his narrative (Chapters XI through XVI) forms the highest achievement of the novel, more absorbing even than the magnificent and almost surrealistic pursuit of the climax. In an age so given to remarkable depictions of the dignity of natural man, an age including the shepherds and beggars of Wordsworth, Frankensteins hapless creature stands out as a sublime embodiment of heroic pathos. Though Frankenstein lacks the moral imagination to understand him, the daemons appeal is to what is most compassionate in us:“Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” The passage I have italicized is the imaginative kernel of the novel, a reminder of the novels epigraph:Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me man? Did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?Paradise Lost, Book X, 7435That desperate plangency of the fallen Adam becomes the characteristic accent of the daemons lamentations, with the influence of Milton cunningly built into the novels narrative by the happy device of Frankensteins creature receiving his education through reading Paradise Lost “as a true history.” Already doomed because his standards are human, which makes him an outcast even to himself, his Miltonic education completes his fatal growth in self-consciousness.If we stand back from Mary Shelleys novel, in order better to view its archetypal shape, we see it as the quest of a solitary and ravaged consciousness first for consolation, then for revenge, and finally for a self-destruction that will be apocalyptic, that will bring down the creator with his creature. Though Mary Shelley may not have intended it, her novels prime theme is a necessary counterpoise to Prometheanism, for Prometheanism exalts the increase in consciousness despite all cost. Frankenstein breaks through the barrier that separates man from God, and apparently becomes the giver of life, but all he actually can give is death-in-life. The profound dejection endemic in Mary Shelleys novel is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self, for all Romantic horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear the self. Kierkegaard remarks that Satans despair is absolute, because Satan as pure spirit is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair. Frankensteins desperate creature attains the state of pure spirit through his extraordinary situation, and is racked by a consciousness in which every thought is a fresh disease.A Romantic poet fought against self-consciousness through the strength of what he called imagination, a more than rational energy, by which thought could seek to heal itself. But Frankensteins daemon, though he is in the archetypal situation of the Romantic Wanderer or Solitary, who sometimes was a poet, can win no release from his own story by telling it. His desperate desire for a mate is clearly an attempt to find a Shelleyan Epipsyche or Blakean Emanation for himself, a self within the self. But as he is the nightmare actualization of Frankensteins desire, he is himself an emanation of Promethean yearnings, and his only double is his creator and denier.When Coleridges Ancient Mariner progressed from the purgatory of consciousness to his very minimal control of imagination, he failed to save himself. He remained in a cycle of remorse. But he at least became a salutary warning to others, and made of the Wedding Guest a wiser and a better man. Frankensteins creature can help neither himself nor others, for he has no natural ground to which he can return. Romantic poets liked to return to the imagery of the ocean of life and immortality; in the eddying to and fro of the healing waters they could picture a hoped-for process of restoration, of a survival of consciousness despite all its agonies. Mary Shelley, with marvelous appropriateness, brings her Romantic novel to a demonic conclusion in a world of ice. The frozen sea is the inevitable emblem for both the wretched daemon and his obsessed creator, but the daemon is allowed a final image of reversed Prometheanism. There is a heroism fully earned in the being who cries farewell in a claim of sad triumph: “I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.”There is something both Godwinian and Shelleyan about the final utterance of Victor Frankenstein, which is properly made to Walton, the failed Promethean, whose ship has just turned back. Though chastened, the Modern Prometheus ends with a last word true, not to his accomplishment, but to his desire:“Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” Shelleys Prometheus, crucified on his icy precipice, found his ultimate torment in a Furys taunt: “And all best things are thus confused to ill.” It seems a fitting summation for all the work done by Modern Prometheanism, and might have served as an alternate epigraph for Mary Shelleys disturbing novel.Source Citation: Bloom, Harold. An excerpt from a study of Frankenstein: or, The New Prometheus. Partisan Review. 32.4 (Fall 1965): 611-618. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 611-618. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Watchung Hills Reg H.S. 23 Sept. 2009 Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420002965 Top of page 1 2 3 4 5