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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)Q What are the dangers of “the acquirement of
knowledge,” according to Dr. Frankenstein?Q Why does he ultimately experience
“breathless horror and disgust”?34 CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero34
his teeth of 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 different accidents of life are not so changeable as the
feelings of human nature. 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. I had
desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but 150
now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and
breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure
the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room
and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to
compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to
the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed
in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of
forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed, but I was
disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in
the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. 160
Delighted and surprized, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the
first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death;
her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the
corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her
form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the
flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew
covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb
became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the
moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I
beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had 170
created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes
they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he
muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his
cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand
was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and
rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to
the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest
of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation,
listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it
were to announce the approach of the daemoniacal corpse to 180
which I had so miserably given life....Byron and the Promethean Myth
The Promethean myth found its most passionate champion
in the life and works of the English poet George Gordon,
Lord Byron (1788–1824). Byron was one of the most flam-
boyant personalities of the age (see Figure 28.1). Dedicated
to pleasures of the senses, he was equally impassioned by
the ideals of liberty and brotherhood. In his brief, mercuri-
al life, he established the prototype of the Romantic hero,
often called the Byronic hero.
As a young man, Byron traveled restlessly throughout
Europe and the Mediterranean, devouring the landscapeand the major sites. A physically attractive man (despite
the handicap of a club foot) with dark, brooding eyes, he
engaged in numerous love affairs, including one with his
half-sister. In 1816, Byron abandoned an unsuccessful
marriage and left England for good. He lived in Italy for a
time with the Shelleys and a string of mistresses. By this
time, he had earned such a reputation of dangerous non-
conformity that an English woman, catching sight of the
poet in Rome, warned her daughter: “Do not look at him!
He is dangerous to look at.” In 1824, Byron sailed to Greece
to aid the Greeks in their war of independence against the
Turks—one of the many episodes in the turbulent history
of nineteenth-century nationalism. There, in his last hero-
ic role, he died of a fever.
Throughout his life, Byron was given to periodic bouts
of creativity and dissipation. A man of violent passions, he
once described himself as “half-mad... between meta-
physics, mountains, lakes, love indistinguishable, and the
nightmare of my own delinquencies.” Intent on sharing his
innermost feelings, he became the hero of his two great
poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) and Don
Juan, the latter written in installments between 1819 and
1824, and left unfinished at his death. The first poem nar-
rates the wandering of Childe Harold, Byron’s fictional
self, whom he describes as “the most unfit /Of men to herd
with man; with whom he held /Little in common.” The
disillusioned hero finds solace, however, in nature, as
Byron writes in Canto Three (13):
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language...
Begun in Venice, Don Juan drew on the legendary, fiction-
al Spanish libertine who had also inspired Mozart’s Don
Giovanni (see chapter 26). Byron’s don, however, is not the
lustful womanizer of Mozart’s opera; rather, he is a figure
who stumbles into love in what might be called a romance
of roguery, or—in Byron’s words—“a satire on the abuses of
society.” Byron’s disdain for the social conventions of his
time and place are brilliantly mocked in a work that the
author described as an “epic on modern life.”
By comparison with the other heroes of his literary
career, Prometheus, the god who “stole from Heaven the
flame, for which he fell,” preoccupied Byron as a symbol of
triumphant individualism. For the poet, capturing the
imagination in art or in life was comparable to stealing the
sacred fire. In a number of his poems, he compares the fall-
en Napoleon to the mythic Prometheus—symbol of heroic
ambition and ungovernable passions. But in the stirring
ode called simply “Prometheus,” Byron makes of the
Promethean myth a parable for the Romantic imagination.
He begins by recalling the traditional story of the hero
whose “Godlike crime was to be kind.” He goes on to iden-
tify Prometheus as a “symbol and a sign” to mortals who,
although “part divine,” are doomed to “funereal destiny.”
Like Prometheus, says Byron, we must strive to defy that
destiny by pursuing the creative projects that will outlive