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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)The Promethean Hero
READING 30.
32 CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero32
Bryon and the Promethean Myth
If Napoleon was nineteenth-century Europe’s favorite real-
life hero, Prometheus was its favorite fictional hero.
Prometheus (the name means “forethought”) was one of
the primordial deities of Greek mythology. According to
legend, Prometheus challenged Zeus by stealing from his
home on Mount Olympus the sacred fire (source of divine
wisdom and creative inspiration) and bestowing this great
gift upon humankind. As punishment, Zeus chained him to
a lonely rock, where an eagle fed daily on his liver, miracu-
lously restored each night. A second, less dramatic aspect of
the Prometheus story, more popular among the Romans
than the Greeks, credited the hero with having fashioned
human beings out of clay, in the manner of the Babylonian
hero-god Marduk (see chapter 1).
Romantic poets embraced the figure of Prometheus
as the suffering champion of humanity—a symbol of free-
dom and a deliverer whose noble ambitions had incurred
the wrath of the gods. Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom we met
in chapter 27, made Prometheus the savior-hero of his
four-act play Prometheus Unbound(1820). In this drama,
Prometheus frees the universe from the tyranny of the
gods. Two years earlier, in 1818, Shelley’s second wife,
Mary Godwin Shelley (1797–1851), explored the
Promethean legend in her novel Frankenstein; or, The
Modern Prometheus. The daughter of William Godwin and
the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (see chapter 24),
Mary Shelley began writing Frankensteinat the age of
eighteen. Framed as a series of letters, the novel relates the
astonishing tale of the scientist–philosopher Victor
Frankenstein, who, having discovered the secret of impart-
ing life to inanimate matter, produces a monster endowed
with supernatural strength (Figure 28.3). A modern
Prometheus, Frankenstein suffers the punishment for his
ambitious designs when the creature, excluded from the
normal life of ordinary mortals, betrays his creator: “I was
benevolent and good,” he protests, “misery made me a
fiend.” Like the fallen Lucifer, Frankenstein’s creation ulti-
mately becomes a figure of heroic evil.
Frankensteinbelongs to a literary genre known as the
Gothic novel, a type of entertainment that features ele-
ments of horror and the supernatural cast in a medieval
(“Gothic”) setting. Such novels, the earliest of which was
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto(1764), reflect the
rising tide of antirationalism and a revived interest in the
medieval past. Shelley’s novel—actually a scientific hor-
ror tale—has become a modern classic. The first literary
work to question the human impact of scientific research,
it has inspired numerous science fiction “spinoffs,” as well
as cinematic and stage renderings. Ironically, however, it
is not the scientist but the monster that has captured the
modern imagination, even to the point of usurping the
name of his creator.From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(Chapters 4 and 5) (1818)
... One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my 1
attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed,
any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did
the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one
which has ever been considered as a mystery: yet with how
many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted,
if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our enquiries.
I revolved these circumstances in my mind and determined
thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches
of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had 10
been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my
application to this study would have been irksome and almost
intolerable. To examine the causes of life, we must first have
recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of
anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the
natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my
education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my
mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not
ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to
have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect 20
upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to be merely the
receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat
of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I
was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and
forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses.
My attention was fixed upon every object the most
Figure 28. 3 The first illustration of the Frankensteinmonster,
frontispiece from the 1831 Standards Novel edition.